Viper’s Nest

When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.

By Ruth Franklin

Oct. 3, 2014

When Elie Wiesel approached the ­author François Mauriac in the 1950s with a draft of the memoir that would become “Night,” Mauriac was skeptical — not of the book’s quality, but of its necessity. What on earth could “this personal rec­ord, coming as it does after so many others and describing an abomination such as we might have thought no longer had any secrets for us,” have to add to the already vast body of literature about the Holocaust? he wondered. One reads this now with an ironic chuckle. As we approach the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the Holocaust, among all its other perverse distinctions, has become the most documented genocide in history. There are memoirs by both survivors and high-ranking Nazis; diaries of life under Nazi rule; collections of letters between SS ­officers and their families; specific investigations of the Nazi doctors, the last few months of the war and the structure of the SS; and multiple biographies of figures major and minor. And that list includes only the books Martin Amis mentions in the afterword to his new novel.

An unintended consequence of this documentation glut is that it is harder now than it has ever been to write a novel about the Holocaust. Fiction grows out of hypotheticals — what would happen if . . . — and when so much is known, what remains? In general, the most successful novels have grappled not with the war years but with their aftermath: W. G. Sebald’s “Austerlitz,” for instance, about a child who was brought to England by Kindertransport and grew up unaware of his true family history. But Amis has given himself the most difficult task of all: a novel set in Auschwitz, the killing machine that has become so gruesomely familiar — the transports, the selections, the gas chambers.

In a writing career that now stretches to 14 novels, Amis has never allowed himself to coast. A linguistic chameleon, he ­remakes his style and form for every book. But the pressure to make it new seems to bear down on him even more stringently with regard to this subject. In his first treatment of the Holocaust, the 1991 novel “Time’s Arrow,” he told the life story of a Nazi in reverse, starting with his death and proceeding backward through his years in exile under a series of assumed identities, climaxing with Auschwitz. (The point of this chronological trickery originates with Primo Levi, who said that the concentration camp was “a world turned upside down,” where doctors were murderers and crimes were rewarded.) Now, in “The Zone of Interest,” he spins out a love story between a midlevel Nazi functionary and the camp commandant’s wife, with a member of the Sonderkommando — the prisoners charged with cleaning out the gas chambers and disposing of the bodies — as onlooker.

Alas, even the idea of love at Auschwitz is not new: The poet and political prisoner Tadeusz Borowski wrote love poems to his girlfriend set in the camp, and others have explored the network of sex-for-­favors that existed there. But a bigger problem with this novel is that Amis, ­always a dedicated researcher — he read “several yards of books” about the Soviet Union before writing “Koba the Dread,” his nonfictional but novelistic examination of Stalin’s crimes — cannot transcend his documentation. “The Zone of Interest” is a Holocaust novel consciously of its moment, written for a 21st-century audience that will nod knowingly at the allusions to David Rousset, Paul Celan and Primo Levi. But it offers no new insights into questions that those writers have more thoughtfully ­examined.

There are three strands here, each narrated by a different voice. Angelus (Golo) Thomsen is in charge of overseeing the construction of Auschwitz III, a labor subcamp also known as Buna or Monowitz-Buna, where prisoners produced synthetic rubber for the firm I. G. Farben. Thomsen seems to be disturbed by the way the Jews are treated, and at one point he counts himself among the “obstruktiv Mitlaufere,” or uncooperative fellow-travelers: “We went along . . . doing all we could to drag our feet and scuff the carpets and scratch the parquet, but we went along.” But his thoughts are mainly occupied by his sexual obsession with Hannah Doll, a sensitive woman tormented by her husband’s work. Can he get away with seducing her, “here . . . where everything was allowed”?

Hannah’s husband, Paul Doll, narrates the second strand. Amis has never been afraid to be ugly in order to make a point, and his Doll — loosely based on Rudolf Höss, it appears — is hideously convincing. He speaks in a kind of grotesque ­gibberish, his diction at once larded with clichés — “enough on my plate,” “takes the cake” — and the convoluted, euphemistic constructions that characterized Nazi jargon. (He refers to prisoners, in a direct translation of the German, as ­“pieces” rather than human beings.) Somehow the sprinkling of German vocabulary heightens his vulgarity, especially with regard to Hannah: “She ground my face roughly and painfully into the brambles of her Busche, with such force that she split both my lips, then released me with a flourish of contempt. I opened my eyes, and saw the vertical beads of her Ruckgrat, the twin curves of her Taille, the great oscillating hemispheres of her Arsch.” (No knowledge of German is required to decipher this.)

Golo’s language, too, is infected by the debased camp jargon, although somewhat less successfully. For some reason, in his sections Amis spells out KZ, his chosen term for Auschwitz and the abbreviation for the German Konzentrationslager, in English as Kat Zet, which approximates the correct pronunciation but is weirdly reminiscent of the Kit Kat Klub. Also ­unfortunate is the shortening of “crematorium” to “crema” (the Nazis used the term “Krema”), which looks like something you might put in your coffee. A more seriously questionable judgment is Amis’s transformation of a line from Celan’s ­famous poem “Death Fugue,” in which a Nazi officer symbolically “plays with his vipers,” into Doll “playing with his Viper” — that is, masturbating.

Something more than taste is an issue in Amis’s choice of the third narrator: Szmul, the leader of the Sonderkommando. This group, whose members were known in the camp as “crematorium ravens,” has come to personify the nadir of degradation. Little is known about them, because almost none survived — they were replaced every few months, with each incoming group tasked with disposing of their predecessors — and with the exception of Levi, very few have written about them. Rather than drawing a portrait of depravity, Amis renders Szmul as morally exhausted, one of “the saddest men in the history of the world.” But it’s unclear what function Szmul serves in the novel, other than to demonstrate that Amis dares imaginatively to go places where almost no one else will venture. And while no subject should be off limits for fiction, one hesitates to see words put in the mouth of such a character — ­especially, as Amis does, in a sentimental parable comparing Ausch­witz to a “magic mirror” that “showed you your soul.”

Amis is one of the most inventive users of language currently at work in English — his sentences cannot help crackling — as well as a uniquely talented satirist. But when it comes to the deeper problems of the Nazi pathology that gave rise to the jargon he so brilliantly parodies, he does not have much to offer. Is the brutal Paul Doll correct in his repeated insistence that he is “completely normal”? Is Golo Thomsen, as he claims, one of “hundreds of thousands . . . maybe millions” of ­Nazis who passively tried to obstruct the regime? Was Auschwitz truly a mirror of the soul that reflected people as they ­really were? Such questions may be unanswerable. Still, a novel that raises them should at least make an attempt at grappling with them.

THE ZONE OF INTEREST

By Martin Amis

306 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95.

Correction:

A review on Oct. 5 about “The Zone of Interest,” a novel by Martin Amis set in Auschwitz, misidentified the historical figure on whom one of the book’s characters, Paul Doll, the camp commandant, seems loosely based. He was the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, not Rudolf Hess , who was deputy leader of the Nazi Party.

Ruth Franklin is the author of “A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction.” She is working on a biography of Shirley Jackson.